I will start this off lightly with a bit of humour that we learned from math camp.

Ma and Pa Kettle's Math

This basically states that 25 divided by 5 is 14.

For those of you who are interested, or would like to show other people (or even students) an example of this, you can use either the example in the video or create your own. For those who have trouble recalling terminology:

a/b = c
  • a is called the dividend
  • b is called the divisor
  • c is called the quotient

The rules for creating your own are fairly simple and straight forward:
  1. The dividend must be two digits
  2. The divisor must be single digit
  3. The divisor must divide evenly into the dividend
  4. The divisor must be less than the first digit of the dividend
  5. The divisor must be less than or equal to the second digit of the dividend
  6. The question is simpler to deal with if all the numbers are positive

Misconception 1

When talking about things such as 5x where x=4, one must be careful to